Bangladesh and India: rivers, trade & connectivity
Bangladesh-India ties through water-sharing treaties, trade balance, and connectivity corridors—core BCS material on the relationship that defines Dhaka's foreign policy.
The transboundary river question
Bangladesh and India share 54 transboundary rivers, and water-sharing is the most enduring structural irritant in the relationship. The defining instrument is the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty of 12 December 1996, signed by Prime Ministers Sheikh Hasina and H.D. Deve Gowda for a 30-year term (expiring 2026). It governs the dry-season distribution of the Ganges at the Farakka Barrage, commissioned by India in 1975 about 18 km upstream of the Bangladesh border. The treaty's Annexure I fixes a sharing formula for the lean period of 1 January to 31 May: when flow at Farakka is 70,000 cusecs or less, India and Bangladesh each receive 50 percent; a guarantee clause assures Bangladesh 35,000 cusecs in alternating ten-day periods during the critical 1 March to 10 May window.
The Teesta deadlock
The Teesta River dispute remains unresolved. An interim sharing arrangement was negotiated and ready for signature during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Dhaka visit in September 2011, but it collapsed at the last moment owing to objections from West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who controls the riparian state under India's federal structure. The proposed deal would have allotted Bangladesh roughly 37.5 percent and India 42.5 percent of the dry-season flow. The episode illustrates a recurring BCS theme: India's federalism means that state-level politics (West Bengal, Tripura, Assam) can veto bilateral agreements, complicating Dhaka's diplomacy.
Floods, the Tipaimukh question and the Joint Rivers Commission
Bangladesh, as the lower riparian on the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basin—the world's second-largest river system by discharge—is acutely vulnerable to upstream withdrawal and to floods. The India-Bangladesh Joint Rivers Commission (JRC), established in 1972 under the framework of the friendship treaty, is the institutional mechanism for managing shared waters; it has met intermittently and was revived at the secretary level in 2022. Bangladesh has long voiced concern over India's proposed Tipaimukh hydroelectric dam on the Barak River in Manipur, fearing downstream impacts on the Surma and Kushiyara. In 2019 the two sides signed an MoU on withdrawal of water from the Kushiyara River, a modest but symbolically important step.
Candidates should retain the legal-diplomatic distinction: water-sharing operates bilaterally, outside any binding multilateral convention, because India is not a party to the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention. This leaves Bangladesh reliant on bilateral negotiation and the principle of equitable utilisation rather than enforceable international adjudication—a vulnerability examiners frequently probe.